charles.marslett@tempe.vlsi.com (Charles Marslett) writes:>radiation transport code for use on small/slow 360s. The Fortran H>compiled code, profiled to be spending 45% of its time in a single>routine (it did a dot product, followed by a vector/matrix multiply,
........stuff about Fortran H omitted

I think that part of the gap in the discussion is that some people are
talking about asm vs C compiles whereas others are talking about asm
vs Fortran compilers. It is easier to optimise Fortran than C and
because Fortran is used more for number crunching much greater
attention is paid to optimising it.

I expect that it is unlikely that a human can write better asm than a
good Fortran compiler. However given the quality of C compilers,
especially, from what I've heard about VC++, I expect that a human
could often write better asm, in small bursts.